“The Day of Doom,” and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College, were instances of this twofold service.  In politics their influence has always been felt, and in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it ever sounded in the slumbering camp.  Samuel Cooper sat in council with the leaders of the Revolution in Boston.  The three Northampton-born brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and, when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty.  In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times still more recent.

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office, tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at present.  Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence, as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the last of the “fair, white, curly” wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify.  They were not only learned in the history of the past, but they were the interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming events with a confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us of a coming storm.  The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the Revelation were not too hard for them.  In the commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as it appears, about the year 1773:  “Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after many things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this manner:  ’Tell your children to tell their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in the church; tell them the old man says so.’”

The “old man” came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870.  In 1864 the Pope issued the “Syllabus of Errors,” which “must be considered by Romanists—­as an infallible official document, and which arrays the papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and religious freedom.”  The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began the decisive movement of the party known as the “Old Catholics.”  In the exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome by the French and the publication of “Ecce Homo” appear to be the most remarkable events having Special relation to the religious world.  Perhaps the National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of the occurrences which the oracle just missed.